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Serving SOAP Documentation from WSDL

Problem

You are using SOAP and WSDL to
build a service-based enterprise
architecture. You want developers to be able to find complete and
pertinent information on available services.

Solution

This solution constructs a
WSDL-based service
documentation server: a service that provides information about
services.[29] This example will use a Perl-based CGI that invokes XSLT
processing on a single WSDL file containing or including information
about all services available in an enterprise. Here the CGI invokes
the XSLT processor in a system call. This clumsy
setup is good for prototyping but not production use. A better
solution would use the Perl modules XML::LibXML
and XML::LibXSLT. An even better architecture
would use a more sophisticated server-side XSLT-enabled solution such
as Cocoon. To focus
on the XSLT and WSDL aspects of this example, and not the CGI
architecture, we took a simplistic approach.

The site’s main page is generated by a CGI that
shows the user available services and ports. See the discussion for
explanations of services and ports. It uses the following Perl CGI
frontend to Saxon: